Having understood neither the title nor the jacket blurb, I approached the preface of this book with caution. Feeling further baffled and a little dizzy I closed the book and concluded that I was in no way qualified to review the book. An edited version of the jacket blurb reads: `This book explores the much maligned and misunderstood genre of declamation. Instead of a bastard rhetoric, declamation should be seen as a venue within which the rhetoric of the legitimate self is constructed. These fictions of the self are cannily real, and these stagey dramas are in fact rehearsals for the serious play of Roman identity. This book makes broad claims for what is often seen as a narrow topic. An appendix includes a new translation and brief discussion of a selection of surviving documents of declamation.'